Never again
A replay of the Rwandan genocide is in the making while the UN and the international community remain impassive, writes Faiza Rady
Katoto, a small village in eastern Congo was burned down last week. What exactly happened in there is not clear. What is clear, however, is that 121 people were killed. The mainly Hema Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) that controls Katoto claims that a rival Lendu militia attacked, ransacked the village and massacred its people. But the UPC claims cannot be verified since people are too frightened to speak. The Katoto scenario has become a familiar one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Over the past few months, the north- eastern Congolese town of Bunia and the entire Ituri district have been devastated by a deadly civil war, ominously featuring ethnic cleansing and forecasting a kind of genocide comparable to the 1994 massacres in Rwanda.
After the Rwandan genocide, which claimed the lives of 800,000 people during those fateful months of June and July 1994, the so-called international community -- as embodied in the UN and represented by the Security Council -- vowed that it would "never again" quietly stand by and watch genocide unfold.
But as always, the powers that be quickly and conveniently forgot about their pledges. As the international clamour over Rwanda subsided in time, the small and impoverished African nation slipped back into political oblivion. Unlike Iraq, Rwanda does not sit on 10 per cent of the world's oil reserves -- or on any other significant reserves for that matter.
Regardless, the seeds of the conflict that had so tragically transformed Rwanda into vast killing fields, in the summer of 1994, did not simply go away. Largely ignored by the UN and the world powers, the conflict as such was never resolved, but simply exported to neighbouring countries.
So it came to pass that Rwanda's genocidal Interahamwe Hutu Forces -- who had effectively planned and engineered the massacres of the Tutsi and their supporters among the Hutu -- fled to the DRC, then Zaire, in August 1994. Since the DRC shares a border with Rwanda, the Hutu militias viewed the Congo as a convenient base. The leadership quickly regrouped, and given licence to cross the border into Rwanda, they began to regularly launch attacks against their nemesis, the Tutsi- dominated government of Paul Kagame.
Unresolved and swept under the carpet by the "international community", the conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi insidiously found its way to the Congo, home to a large indigenous Hutu population.
In an eerie replay of 1994, the Rwandan Hutu-Tutsi tragedy foreshadowed the bloody and relentless conflict pitting ethnic Lendu against Hema militias in the Ituri district in north-eastern Congo, an area roughly the size of France.
The Lendu are agriculturalists, while the Hema both farm and rear livestock. Like the Hutu in Rwanda prior to 1994, the Lendu constitute an impoverished and disenfranchised majority and are employed in large part by the more affluent Hema. The Lendu regard the relatively more privileged Hema as traitors and former agents of Belgian imperialism, just as the Rwandan Hutu regarded the Tutsi prior to the genocide.
The DRC, which gave asylum to fleeing Rwandan Hutu forces in 1994 therefore supported the Lendu, while the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government of Paul Kagame supported the Hema.
In 1998, the stage was set for the conflict to be refuelled by foreign occupiers. In effect, 1998 witnessed the beginning of an all-African war in the DRC. Dubbed the "first African world war", the war in the Congo involved both Uganda and Rwanda as key players in addition to Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola.
These states justified their military occupation of the DRC in terms of security. Originally allied with Laurent- Desiré Kabila in the Alliance of Forces for Democracy and the Liberation of the Congo (AFDLC), Uganda and Rwanda fought a seven-month-long war against Mobutu Sese Seku in 1997. When the US-supported AFDLC forces finally toppled the infamous dictator and reached Kinshasa, their victory was hailed as a new era for the central African region, signalling the triumph of "good over evil" and an "African renaissance".
The rhetoric, however, only served to mask the ripples before the storm. The DRC's over-enthusiastic neighbours -- Rwanda and Uganda in particular -- expected to be paid fat dividends for their support of Kabila's war of liberation. The AFDLC forces had come to stay and cash in on the "African renaissance", and the mineral-rich country was going to be milked for all its worth.
Thus according to a by now familiar scenario the "liberators" quickly turned into occupiers and looters. Soon Uganda and Rwanda broke ranks and began to arm and finance rival ethnic killer militias, who served to protect and control both countries' respective turfs in the DRC. The Rwandans support the Hema militias, while the Ugandans support the Lendu Congolese Liberation Movement (CLM) led by notorious killer Jean-Pierre Bemba.
Since 1998, the warring factions have wreaked havoc in this vast country with the Congolese people paying a heavy price. The figures are especially devastating given that the DRC is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. It is estimated that 2.5 million people have died since the war began in 1998, and over two million people have become internal or external refugees -- among them 400,000 children.
In a country that used to export food and which has the richest mineral reserves in Africa, 16 million people are critically in need of food and one in five children die before they reach the age of five.
Commenting on the ongoing conflict in the Congo and the depletion of the country's riches, the London-based human rights organisation Oxfam said "it is clear that the driving force behind the conflict is a desire by the warring parties to have access to, and control over, the DRC's vast natural resources."
Besides rights organisations working in the DRC, a UN Commission of Experts has published its findings on the war in a November 2001 report and an April 2002 addendum, which essentially confirms Oxfam's position. "The extraction of natural resources [by the occupiers'] is uncontrolled, unaccountable and commonly defined as illegal," says the report.
Although the occupation armies have by now left the field, their proxy militias continue to guard and secure the mineral-rich areas. It is widely reported that military commanders and criminal cartels have been put into place to secure strategic areas.
In the case of Rwanda, troops controlled Kisangani, an area rich in diamonds, and Kivu a region rich in coltan (a precious metal essential for the production of mobile phones and microprocessors). The extraction of coltan is monopolised by SOMIGL (the Mining Company of the Great Lakes, a Rwandan corporation), which also exports coltan to Rwanda. Moreover, exports into Rwanda are no longer subject to tariffs. Although Rwanda denied looting the DRL's coltan reserves, claiming that its coltan exports to the US and other countries originate from its own domestic production, the UN report's figures are damning. Thus the country's production of coltan prior to 1998 was estimated at 83 tonnes per year, while production soared to 1,440 tonnes per year following Rwanda's occupation of the DRC. "It is highly unlikely that any new mines would have the capability to raise Rwanda's annual coltan production so quickly," commented Oxfam.
Rwanda's export figures of diamonds and gold have also sharply increased since the war began, although neither are mined domestically. This constitutes clear evidence of Rwanda's looting in the Congo, concludes the UN report.
While Rwanda got the bulk of the DRC's coltan, the diamond and gold riches are somewhat shared between Uganda and Rwanda, with each contender making a go for it. Ugandan troops were stationed in Ituri, a gold- rich region and around the former concessions of Kilo Moto.
As a result, gold exports soared from a yearly 0.0044 tonne export pre-1998 to 10.83 tonnes in 2000. Diamond exports to Antwerp were also recorded, although there is no known production of diamonds in Uganda.
As the criminal trade continues to thrive and the militias kill for profits, the shadow of genocide hangs over Bunia and the Ituri region. Yet the "international community" remains impassive.
